Lord of the Night

Sahaal's empire was crumbling beneath him.

They had driven a wedge into the refugee encampment, lighting fires across rag rooftops and straw walls as they went. A great phalanx of Salamanders and Chimeras bulldozed all that stood before them, crewmen standing brazenly on each one, glossy armour lit devilishly in the flames of the burning terrain. Despite the destruction the vindictors had been careful to discriminate amongst their enemies: assiduously avoiding the temptation to open fire upon the shrieking, fleeing sections of the crowd.

'The Night Lord is dead... We are here to liberate you from your slavery... The Night Lord is dead...'

It was a masterful piece of duplicity. Arranged against the combined strength of the Shadowkin and the refugees, the Preafects knew that they had little hope of victory. But with words alone they could divide their enemies: appealing to the refugees' self-preservation, shattering the bonds of terror that Sahaal had spent so long cultivating.

They fled in their hundreds, past the ravaging tanks and up, up by the long northern road, back into their empty dwellings in the undercity above. Like insects casting off their cocoons they threw off the shackles of alliance that Sahaal had forced upon them, they washed clean their hands of the murders each had committed, they ran into the dark with a prayer of forgiveness and a backward glance, and then they were gone.

The Shadowkin themselves received no such mercy. They had courted the daemon as their own master. No excuses of slavery could stain their lips.

The tanks gathered at the banks of the burning swamp, and one by one their mighty ca

Ironic, Sahaal mused, that a tribe so devout could be so defiled. It was not the Preafects who had betrayed their Emperor, after all...

Should he act? Should he attempt to intervene? Would it do any good?

The ca

The Shadowkin died like vermin, and as his kingdom was toppled before his eyes Sahaal found himself sinking to his knees, overcome, wracked by such powerful emotions that he couldn't define where horror became grief, where loss became madness, and where insanity became rage.

He stood abruptly, body rising in a single movement, discarding the captive majordomo at his feet, forgotten.

Rage. Yes... He could focus on rage.

He knew where he was with rage.

His claws sprung from their sheaths with a relish he could barely contain, and he threw back his head and screamed: a primal shriek that burned away every thought, that stripped clean his body and his mind of everything but pure, unpolluted, uncontainable fury.

He would kill them all for what they had done to his people. He would rip apart the tanks with his bare hands, he would rise on thermals of death and glory, and show these pitiful humans what it was to cross the Talonmaster! He would—

Would—

It was too much. His brain was not meant for this. His mind had not been shaped to deal with a slumber of a hundred centuries, to withstand the barrage of loss and uncertainty that he had encountered, to feel compassion for the creatures beneath his dominion.

Kill! the voices shrieked. Burn the world! Kill them all!

He was a thing of war. He was a weapon of terror, to be aimed and released. He had never intended to be so lost from his brothers, to grow so isolated from the path of the Night Haunter. He had never been intended to be so subject to human emotion.

He was weak.

He was going insane. And he knew it.

Hidden at the mouth of the secret tu

He fell to floor like some contemptible, shellshocked little human — a total breakdown without escape — and unconsciousness devoured him whole.

On Tsagualsa, the Night Haunter spoke his name, and selected him above all others as his heir. How had he felt, in that frozen moment? How had his selection ignited his mind?

He felt... unsurprised. He felt as though he had always expected it.

He was the Talonmaster. He was his master's truest son. It was natural.

The brute Acerbus left without comment.

On Tsagualsa the Night Haunter dismissed his remaining captains, and to his throne he led Zso Sahaal.

Yours, one day. One day soon!

And he had told Sahaal how it would happen, how he had seen it: burned upon his dreams like a cruel pantomime, played out over and over every night. An assassin of the Callidus shrine would come for him, slinking in the dark, creeping across the writhing galleries of the living palace with her heart hammering in her ears, her fists clenched tight.

There would be no opposition. No attempts to stand in her way. She must be allowed through to enact the final grisly scene.

The Night Haunter, baleful eyes shining, lipless mouth trembling, turned to Sahaal then and made him vow it. Arms interlocked, eyes meeting in shadowed pools.

There would be no intervention. The assassin would fulfil her role. She would play out her part in the endless comedy. Sahaal vowed it, and hated himself. And the Night Haunter, Konrad Curze, his master, made him vow to watch it all. To stare from the shadows to see it happen. He made him vow it on the sacred hatred of the Legion, on the insult that must he repaid, and Sahaal could no more break his oath than he could kill his lord himself. He would watch his master die. And when the she-bitch was gone — her bloody task complete — he would step from his vantage and lift from his master's corpse the Corona Nox. He would take it for himself. He would show it as his symbol of office, and he would lead the Night Lords ever onwards. He vowed it.

He would lead them as his master had done, with boundless hate and endless patience. He would unite them in crusade upon the Traitor Emperor, and all would be well.

And his master turned to him and asked him if he knew, if he understood, what it was that made the Night Lords weak. What was the flaw that crippled their hearts?

Sahaal did not know, so Konrad Curze sat and smiled, and told him.

It had something to do with power. It had something to do with rage. It had something to do with the fear that the Legion grasped, the terror they used as a weapon to destroy their foes.

Fear must be a means to an end, he said. It must be used as an instrument in pursuit of a goal, whether it be obedience or peace or genocide. Just as the Night Haunter had been used as his father's ugly tool, so too must the Legion use fear.